Wow, what a weekend. Where do I start? I guess it would be last Tuesday. Melanie and I left Indy in the motorhome headed for Englishtown about 2:30 p.m. It was an uneventful trip for us, but it was a long day. We had to be in Englishtown for Melanie to attend the press conference Wednesday at noon and I had to head to Greenwich, Conn., Wednesday evening to have dinner with all the board of directors for UST. I ended my shift of driving about midnight and Melanie got a burst of energy and drove us on into the track arriving about 3:30 a.m. It rained most of the way so the motorhome was dirty. It started to rain again Wednesday morning so I got a bucket and soaped the motorhome. The rain did a nice job of rinsing it off for me.

I headed to Connecticut about 3 p.m. just after Mel got back to the track. Man does New York have the traffic. It took me over three hours to get where I was going and it was only 78 miles. I met 'Snake' there and we had a really great time with the UST people.

I got up Thursday morning in time to watch Melanie and the other girls on Good Morning America. I thought they did a great job of promoting drag racing and representing our sport to a huge national audience. I spent Thursday at UST headquarters in meetings and then Thursday evening we had an employee cookout in the parking lot. I went back to the hotel afterwards and waited for the traffic to die down before I drove back to the track. It only took me an hour and fifty minutes to get back. Much better.

Our weekend started off great on our first run in qualifying. I felt we had solved all the problems with our car in Joliet and was expecting big things in Englishtown. We ran a 4.77 right out of the box and put ourselves No. 1. We were able to come back Friday night and improve to a 4.72 to keep the No. 1 spot. Saturday we played a little the first run to see what we could get away with and it smoked the tires. Mike and Scott put it back and we went low E.T. for the last session of qualifying. I had several fans bring us peanut M&M’s last weekend and they all told me they where for good luck. They must have worked.

Sunday was an incredible day. It had been so long since our car has blown up or had a fire that I wasn’t expecting anything like that first round. It spun the tires at mid-track, I peddled it, and it took off. Everything was great until right before the finish line. Next thing I know I can see fire in the dash windows. I hit the bottles and it kept burning. I finally got it stopped and bailed out. The fire never got too bad on me, but the smoke and fumes got pretty tough after awhile. I was so bummed because we had just got our car running well and now this. Sometimes a fire can cause problems with stuff you can’t find for some time and it can really plague your performance.

My guys went right to work and I have to thank Mike Ashley’s and Bob Vandergriff’s teams for coming over and helping us. I don’t know if we would have made it without them. It is so cool to see how everyone comes together when someone has problems. I’ve really got to hand it to my guys because we not only made it back to race second round we set low E.T. of eliminations in beating Jack Beckman. That was an incredible feat. I hurt my back a little getting out of the car while it was burning, but it didn’t hurt a bit once the engine started. I was going to drive my hardest to get the guys a win after all the work they had done.

In the semis I cut a good enough light to edge Jeff Arend, who is having a great season. They call it a holeshot win, but everyone in Funny Car knows that it is all about where you stage on Sunday and a lot more factors play into it. I won’t call them a holeshot win anymore unless there is about three hundreds difference in E.T.’s.

When we got to the final I hadn’t even realized that Larry Dixon was in the finals too. We had so much drama all day that I had lost track of who was doing what. I have wanted to give 'Snake' a double with Larry ever since I had joined the team. Kind of like how I would like to do a double win with Melanie someday. It is so hard to get one car in the winner's circle on Sunday but to get two is really hard. Luckily we were able to beat Tony by a slight margin and Larry won also. I really couldn’t believe it at the end of the track. I thought we could win Sunday morning, but after all the problems I couldn’t believe we pulled it off.

My dad’s birthday was on Father’s Day so I told him that I would go win Englishtown for him. I thought we could and really wanted to for him, but that is a tall task. Man, am I happy to say, “Happy Birthday and Father’s Day Dad!”.

It was so cool after the race to watch both of our teams tow the cars back to the winner’s circle side by side down the return road. We took lots of photos in the winner's circle with the two teams together. Then afterwards we all went to dinner together. I have been at Snake Racing for seven years and I have never seen the teams work so closely together. I think that is part of the success we are now starting to see.

Monday morning I didn’t get up too early. Melanie and I had decided that instead of heading home we would go straight to Norwalk and relax for a couple of days. Maybe even go to Cedar Point for a fun day. I went over to the trailer for awhile to help the guys with what I could. They had so much work to do repairing everything that got burnt up. The Impala body was history so Eric on my team took the sawzall to it and cut what was left up saving what we could out of it. The guys had a great idea for one piece of it. A lot of people have donated their trophies to John Medlen after their win in memory of Eric. My guys cut out the driver window and back window area of the car where my name and numbers are. We have black tape through my number and a “In Memory of Eric Medlen” sticker there. We are all going to sign it and give it to John Medlen in Norwalk.

We headed out to Norwalk Monday night after traffic died down. We had problems with our generator running properly over the weekend so I called the Monaco guys and they got us in a repair center along the way to get it fixed. We are sitting in a service bay in Hubbard, Ohio, surfing the net on our computers as they work on the generator and we should be on our way to Norwalk soon.

Good news, just hit the road. Just a bad fuel filter so we are headed to Norwalk. We’ve decided it is time tonight for a quite relaxing evening then I think I’ll take Melanie to Cedar Point tomorrow to ride the “Top Fuel Dragster” ride. I’ll watch. I’m not much on thrill rides. I got enough of one last weekend.